A weekend at SXSW
So we made it to Austin; traveling down here ended up taking the better part of the day Friday, but we were still able to check in to the conference and get our badges and schwag. After checking into the Austin Motel, Billy was kind enough to give me a guided tour of his old stomping grounds. Dinner at El Sol y La Luna, moonlight towers, and live music at Jovitas (Reid Wilson and His So-called Friends). But that’s not why you’re reading, is it?
Day 1: Saturday
Jon Boutelle spoke about his hits and misses in using Flash and Ajax to build a compelling, engaging user interface for slideshare.net. Granted we have not been using a lot of Flash on our sites, but wouldn’t it be nice to sprinkle a little Web 2.0 pixie dust here and there? Not a lot of how-to messages in this session, but more of knowing when, why, and where AJAX is appropriate and useful.
Next, Billy and I both attended Blue Flavor founder Nick Finck’s (also of Digital Web Magazine) session on the contextual Web. I think it is safe to say we both felt we did not gain a lot of new knowledge from this talk, but rather an affirmation of common sense and best practices when thinking about one’s users, environments, common tasks and technology.
I caught the tale end of Steve Souder’s (Google) plug (or “book reading” as they call them at SXSW) for High Performance Web Sites. This half-hour filler between panels was more of an affirmation than enlightenment. Still, I couldn’t prevent myself from wishing they were giving out his books rather than selling them…
After lunch, we caught another book reading: The Back of the Napkin. This was a great 30 minute review of Dan Roam’ (Digital Roam) book detailing how most problems can be solved with visual thinking and simple diagrams.
From there I headed into the Opening Remarks for the conference, as delivered by Henry Jenkins (Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program) and popular science author Steven Johnson. This was a lofty, big concept, inspirational discussion that touched on topics from the future of the social Web to gaming as a way of bringing a community together to blogging as a way of reversing what’s important news on a personal level to realizing that today’s youth is the least violent and most informed generation ever.
Billy and I met back up to hear Jason Fried talk about “10 things We’ve Learned at 37 Signals.” To name a few: Interruption kills productivity; get three things done in one week instead of one thing done in three weeks; don’t set deadlines (yeah) and tie yourself to things you said in the past.
I needed more, and chose a session with a lighter topic: Behind the Scenes at the Onion News Network. This was a lot of fun, though admittedly not at all directly applicable to Web Services. The panelists from the Onion – Sean Mills (President), Will Graham (Executive Producer), Carol Kolb (Head Writer) and Julie Smith (Producer) – spoke about their process from concept to auditioning to avoiding (or rather not avoiding) offending their audience. Also learned that the CMS they use is a forked version of Drupal…
Day 2: Sunday
The first day was pretty exhaustive, and led us to ease into Sunday a little later than the day before. Fortunately, most of the presentations for all panels will be available on slideshare.net which will allow us to review what we saw and view what we missed.
We started the day at the “Responsible Web sites” panel discussion. Led by Greg Rewis of Adobe and Stephanie Sullivan, founder of W3Conversions (a Web Standards consulting firm), Billy saw the writing on the wall and bailed for different venue before the session started. I stayed and found that while it didn’t provide much new information, I did gain some insight as to what we are doing right, and where we could improve.
We met back up for lunch and headed back for the day’s keynote: an interview with Facebook founder (and now CEO) Mark Zuckerberg. This held a lot of promise, and was intensely popular. Unfortunately, the best part of the session was the short time the floor was opened up for Q&A near the end. Mark’s interviewer, Sarah Lacy, seemed to take her role with a sort of flippancy: She spent as much time discussing herself and her history with Mark as she did asking questions. The questions she did ask were often centered on money: ad revenue, the company’s estimated worth, etc. This line of questioning did not sit well with the crowd, who gave a long and loud round of applause when Mark chided his interviewer, saying, “You have to ask me a question!” She eventually got the message, however, which led to the unscheduled Q&A opportunity.
I lost Billy in the crowd when leaving the keynote, and headed on up to the “Does Tomorrow Need Designers?” interactive panel. The topics varied widely in this session, touching on the Netflix recommendation engine; the role of designer developer becoming increasingly intertwined; the expert vs. amateur distinction is becoming flatter; how do you keep a revenue stream growing as more and more people have what they need (e.g. software); if success in design is “when we get it right,” will failure be eradicated as the tools get better(?); the design process is about learning, and learning requires failure, regardless of the sophistication of the tool(s); the fact that Apple produces 10 prototypes for every app – allows the designers to innovate; sustainable design; and the fact that higher education seems to be recognizing that there is a core set of skills that are indicators of a visual designer. It was enjoyable to watch the discussion unfold, though it seems the moderator could have kept the topics more focused.
Tonight is the 11th Annual SXSW Web Awards Ceremony, hosted by comedian Eugene Mirman. More on that soon…
